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Royal Commission slams road building plans

By MICK HAMER

BRITAIN’s £19 billion road building programme should be halved and
the money spent on improving public transport, says the Royal Commission on
Environmental Pollution in its report on transport published last week.

The report is the culmination of a two-year study of the country’s
transport system. The commission wants to see people leaving their cars at
home and instead travelling by public transport and cycling or walking. It
wants the price of petrol doubled over the next ten years. It also wants to
see more freight travelling by rail and water and it argues for measures to
curb the growth of air transport (see
Diagram).FIG-mg19500501.GIF

Transport “is the most important source of the majority of air pollutants”,
says Richard Macrory, a member of the commission. The emissions from vehicles
on the road are one of the most important influences on the quality of air in
large tracts of the country. The concentration of these pollutants in the air
often exceeds WHO guidelines.

Transport is also an important source of greenhouse gases. More than a
fifth of the country’s output of carbon dioxide comes from transport, and road
transport is responsible for 90 per cent of that.

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The commission points out that the level of traffic on the roads is likely
to double over the next 25 years: “Even allowing for technical improvements in
vehicle design, the consequences of growth on such a scale would be
unacceptable in terms of emissions, noise … and disruption of community
life.”

The commission says that only “a fundamentally different approach to
transport policy” will avoid serious environmental damage. “In our view, the
transport system must already be regarded as unsustainable … and will become
progressively more so if recent trends continue.”

John Houghton, the chairman of the commission and a member of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that the report’s 110
recommendations are a set of objectives designed “to provide a solid basis for
a sustainable transport policy. We believe that, in pursuing these objectives
the government should act to achieve clear and, wherever possible, quantified
targets.”

The commission lays down some ambitious targets. It wants to increase the
number of people travelling on public transport by two-thirds over the next
ten years and then increase it by a further 50 per cent over the following 15
years. It also wants more people to get on their bikes, setting a target of
quadrupling the number of bicycles on the road in urban areas.

The scale of the changes that the commission wants is illustrated by its
recommendations for London. Roughly half the journeys made in London are by
car – a smaller proportion than in other urban areas because of the capital’s
better public transport. But the commission wants the proportion of journeys
made by car reduced to 45 per cent by the end of the century and to barely a
third by 2020. “Achieving this target will require both a greater emphasis on
restraining car traffic and the provision of attractive and appropriate
alternatives,” says the report.

The British Road Federation attacked the report, saying that higher levels
of investment in new roads were needed to remove traffic from villages.
“Trying to price traffic off the roads will be economically disastrous,
socially divisive and will ultimately fail to deliver a better
environment.”

But the report was welcomed by environmental groups – the Council for the
Protection of Rural England praised its vision – and by health secretary
Virginia Bottomley and environment secretary John Gummer.

More cautious was transport secretary Brian Mawhinney, who said: “We will
need to look very closely at the report.” Macrory says that the commission
wants the report to be seen as a package of measures that reinforce each
other, so that, for example, higher petrol prices will be complemented by
better public transport.